1 Lehrstück, Opera, and the New Audience Contract of the Epic Theater

UC_Calico_ToPress.qxd 5/6/2008 4:26 PM Page 16 1 Lehrstück, Opera, and the New Audience Contract of the Epic Theater Lehrstücke (learning plays) and opera occupy opposite ends of the con- tinuum for audience experience in musical theater.1 Brecht observed that the social contract in effect for opera audiences stipulated not only that participants empathize with characters, suspend disbelief, and submit to emotional manipulation, but that they do so under the influence of the powerful nar- cotic of continuous music. Similar conditions were imposed in nonoperatic theater, but opera was the most extreme example because of its perpetual, manipulative musical presence. Brecht countered this in two ways: from within the system, in his two operas (Threepenny Opera and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny), and from outside the system, in his four Lehrstücke (Lindbergh Flight, Lehrstück, He Who Said Yes, and The Decision), which did not require an audience at all. Lehrstücke could effec- tively render attendees a nonaudience by transforming them into participants or, at the very least, prospective participants. Brecht’s simultaneous work in both genres in the late 1920s generated the theory of epic theater and determined its primary goal: renegotiation of the audience’s pact with the theater and, by extension, the citizen’s contract with society.2 The fact that epic theater’s provenance is also musical, as it emerged from his simultaneous engagement with two diametrically opposed musical theater genres, Lehrstück and opera,3 warrants further inquiry. Defining the Lehrstück (1928–1930) Brecht ran the Lehrstück experiment concurrently with the opera experiment, thereby attacking the problem of the audience contract from both sides at once.4 In this period he wrote the interactive radio play Lindbergh Flight (The Flight over the Ocean), usually identified as a Lehrstück; Lehr- 16 Copyrighted Material UC_Calico_ToPress.qxd 5/6/2008 4:26 PM Page 17 Lehrstück, Opera, and the Epic Theater / 17 stück (The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent); He Who Said Yes/He Who Said No; The Decision; and The Exception and the Rule.5 These texts are interleaved chronologically with work on Threepenny Opera and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, and their simultaneous gestations pro- vided ample opportunity for cross-pollination and confluence. Lehrstücke were written for a specific time and place, namely, that of the late Weimar Republic and a society thought to be in transition to socialism; when conditions were no longer hospitable, Brecht stopped writing them. Only The Horatians and the Curiatians (1934) and the fragment Demise of the Egotist Johann Fatzer (1927) fall outside the chronological frame. My purpose in this analysis is to reclaim the Lehrstück as a musical genre and establish its status as the anti-opera musical theater tributary to the new audience contract; therefore a brief overview of the Lehrstück is in order.6 The following features are generally agreed upon as definitive of the genre: the Lehrstücke are intended more for the performers than for an audience; the roles are to be rotated among amateur performers; and they serve a didactic purpose. (Note the conspicuous absence of an essential musical component; I will return to this in a moment.) The Lehrstücke unify the production and consumption of art in a single reciprocal process that chal- lenged the concept of audiences as mere consumers of cultural products.7 Of course, as Roswitha Mueller observes, “Audience reception, the insistence that the audience develop an altogether different attitude, is at the core of Brechtian theory,”8 but it has a particular manifestation in the Lehrstücke that undermined the implicit passivity of the word “reception.” The princi- ple that theater required performers and an audience, and that those participants had to be discrete entities, had been the premise of all previous audience contracts in the theater.The Lehrstücke represented a radical affront to that basic tenet. Over time, however, the perception of the role of the audience has become distorted. Brecht had written, “[The Lehrstücke] do not need an audience” (emphasis added),9 but Jameson writes of the necessary “exclusion of the public” (emphasis added),10 demonstrating the ease with which the absence of necessity becomes the necessity of absence. The slippage in this conventional wisdom is to blame for much confusion about the genre, for even under Brecht’s supervision the Lehrstücke were staged for nonperforming audiences more often than performing ones. Lindbergh Flight, Lehrstück, and The Decision all debuted before spectating audiences. Eisler described the premiere of The Decision as an event, and it is the text most often cited as paradigmatic of the Lehrstück. But the advertising campaign, the prominent venue selected for the premiere (the Berlin Philharmonic, Copyrighted Material UC_Calico_ToPress.qxd 5/6/2008 4:26 PM Page 18 18 / Lehrstück, Opera, and the Epic Theater albeit at 11:30 p.m.), and the post-performance questionnaire distributed to audience members all call into question the exclusion of a spectating audience as an essential feature of the genre.11 Apparently these plays could be useful for nonperforming audiences even at the time of their premieres. It is more accurate to say that a Lehrstück may have a spectating audience but that its primary function is not to play to those members.12 The Lehrstück as a Musical Genre Based on the genesis and content of Lindbergh Flight, Lehrstück, He Who Said Yes, and The Decision, I would add two defining features to the list of characteristics cited above, and both pertain to music: A composer was involved as bona fide collaborator from the piece’s inception, and music is essential to its realization because it imposes order on an otherwise loosely structured genre and facilitates the collective experience of the participants. If these criteria are accepted as definitive of the genre, then they also prob- lematize the conventional wisdom outlined above, as we will see. In this context the music is not primarily intended to persuade or entertain an audience but rather to instruct its performers, so it is a fundamentally musical genre, anti-operatic in both conception and purpose. The music is tradi- tionally underestimated in Brechtian literature, thanks in no small part to the playwright’s own efforts to “demusicalize” the genre in later theoreti- cal texts.13 Krabiel’s reassertion of the primacy of music in the Lehrstück, in which he posited that it is related “to the musical genre in origin, form, and purpose,”14 was a landmark moment in its reception, and the historic Berliner Ensemble production of The Decision in 1997 prompted further reconsideration along musical lines.15 I would go beyond describing it as being related to a musical genre, however; the Lehrstück is a musical genre. The Horatians and the Curiatians (1934) and the Fatzer fragment (1927), both of which fall chronologically outside the main body of the repertoire, and The Exception,16 originally planned as a Schaustück (traditional play with spectating audience), are the only Brechtian Lehrstücke not conceived with a musical collaborator from the start. Others were initially written for music festivals, namely the Baden-Baden Festival in 1929 (Lindbergh Flight and Lehrstück) and its successor, Neue Musik Berlin in 1930 (He Who Said Yes and The Decision). They were pro- moted by the musical press across the ideological spectrum, from Zeitschrift für Musik and Melos to the left-leaning Musik und Gesellschaft. By 1931 these journals could report a good-sized repertoire of Lehrstücke and related pieces, much of it written by people outside Brecht’s immediate circle.17 Copyrighted Material UC_Calico_ToPress.qxd 5/6/2008 4:26 PM Page 19 Lehrstück, Opera, and the Epic Theater / 19 The articles lumped together Lehrstücke, school operas, cantatas, and var- ious plays, a gesture that can be interpreted in multiple ways: Musicians viewed the Lehrstück as a close relative of the school opera and therefore as some sort of operatic subset; the boundaries of a new generic category are inevitably fluid and permeable so that a text a playwright might call a Lehrstück could be designated as a school opera by a composer; all musical pieces intended for amateur performance were of a single genus. The collab- orators themselves did not always agree on nomenclature, and sometimes they were inconsistent even unto themselves. Weill called He Who Said Yes a school opera, the designation which appears on the score published by Universal Edition, while Brecht usually referred to it as a Lehrstück, which is how it is identified in the nonmusical literature, although he too deemed it a school opera on occasion.18 Regardless of what they called the genre, Weill and Brecht had similar aims, and variants can be attributed in part to their differing perspectives as composer and playwright. The didactic function of the Lehrstücke is appar- ent in both text and music. Thematically, consent (Einverständnis) in the form of self-sacrifice for the greater good is prominent in three of the texts as a parable for teaching the method (Lehrstück, He Who Said Yes, and The Decision).19 Weill emphasized the musical lessons to be learned from the school opera He Who Said Yes and balanced this with the importance of music as a tool for learning nonmusical lessons: The music of a didactic opera must absolutely be calculated for careful, even lengthy study. For the practical value of didactic opera consists precisely in the study, and as far as the performers are concerned, the performance of such a work is far less important than the training that is linked to it.

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